Free, libre games and development news
Yesterday there was also a new 0.7.0 release of the 3D Worldforge client Ember:
- Completely new tileset
- New buildings: alvearies, barracks, blender, cocoa field, doctor, herbary, lookout, pastry shop, spice field, vineyard, vintner
- Many new graphics for existing buildings
- AI can now handle war and diplomacy
- Vast performance improvements
- New music track: Battle
- Tons of bug fixes
- Updated translations
- Much, much more
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| Worldforge 3D client Ember 0.7.0 |
| Event | Slides | Audio | Video | Speaker |
| Xonotic: The road to 1.0 | Yes | No | No | Merlijn Hofstra |
| FreedroidRPG: Anatomy of a RPG | Yes | Yes | Yes | Arthur Huillet |
| Unknown Horizons: Data-Driven and Component-Based Game-Entities | Yes | Yes | No | Thomas Kinnen |
| WorldForge: The Dynamic Data Driven Worlds | Yes | Yes | No | Alistair Riddoch |
| Pandora: Mobile Linux Computer with Gaming Gontrols | No | No | No | Michael Mrozek |
| Wesnoth: Balancing a Game the Open Source Way | Yes | Yes | No | Jeremy Rosen |
| Ogre3d: Getting Started with Game Development | Yes | Yes | No | Erik Ogenvik |
| Gluon: Game Creation and Distribution | Yes | Yes | No | Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen |
| The Future of Open Web Gaming | Yes | No | No | Rob Hawkes |
== Insert introductory text here ==
Civitas is a project of a colaborative educational game, where children from schools can cooperate in a network for the construction of cities.
Thumbs up to kid/education-related game projects whose creators are brave enough to use standard free licenses!
Clippers is a board game designed by Alan R Moon that is an abstract island connection game based on clipper ships and the south pacific. This computer version is written in Java 1.5 and includes AI players.
The Spring Engine has a nice new homepage and a pleasantly clear list of games. (This is probably very old news but kind of new to me.) I was told that Kernel Panic is a 100% open source game for Spring, but unfortunately I am either too stupid or too lazy to make it work. :|
FreedroidRPG 0.12.1 has been released [download]. The main game map has been re-organized to make more plot-sense. It does, but too many gameplay-useless rooms full of stasis chambers have been added. To my feel, the game is now a lot harder too. However, the controls feel slightly better compared to the last time I tried it. Unfortunately I experienced annoying laggy map-loading and a few crashes from playing too many sounds at once (might have to do with my sofware mixer though). Check out the full changelog for more details.
Cheese Boys [remember?] is still in development - and still looking for artist help... though maybe someone to scout OpenGameArt would even be enough?..
Ardentryst is being constantly developed - the 1.7 release was added three weeks ago.
Eating daggers in RadakanThe WorldForge client Ember now has real-time shadows [announcement].
By the way, WorldForge is in the Google Summer of Code 2009. [GSOC page] as are some other game or gamedev-related projects, as seen in this list.
Mokoi Gaming 0.4 was released. It now supports OSX and contains a Tetris variant [changelog].
Development on Opensource Game Studio has started. Features: 3D, Qt, Lua. It contains a small glxgears-like demo [video]. Nothing to see here yet. :)
The two-day game programming competition Ludum Dare #14 has ended a while ago. Unfortunately nobody except arcticum's and Flood of Air's authors cared to release their game as open source software (or I couldn't find them).
Armagetron Advanced 0.2.8.3_rc2 [download] fixes color filters and crashes. [changelog].
These days there's a flurry of open source game development activity and I don't have time to blog or follow it closely, but here's a highlight of some of the most recent game developments.
Teeworlds 0.5.0 is out. Everybody's favourite game about tea, where you have an entire world of tea bags and... wait, Q is whispering something to me... *listens*
Oh, it's not about tea. The clue was the double-e apparently. Still, despite the disappointing news that there still isn't a game dedicated to my favourite beverage, Teeworlds 0.5.0 is the largest update to the game yet. New features to everybody[ who doesn't love OpenLieroX or another game I can't think of]'s favourite 2D deathmatch Free project include demo recording, a revamped server browser and in-game voting, as well as a a gazillion changes under the hood. There is also a new, shiny 16-player limit.
FreeCol! The game where you get to free Colin! Right?! No? Dammit.... !
Ooooh, the col is short for colonization, which has nothing to do with turning the things into colons but everything to do with creating a new country on new land. Aaah, so, FreeCol 0.8.0 brings lots more polish - bugfixes, music, gameplay tweaks, graphical enhancements - to a project that seeks to embody and improve upon the original game (and succeeds).
Warzone 2100 2.1.1, bugfixes, and it's about war in a zone! I knew it, at least one game had to be guessable from the name!
There's some really interesting posts on the Worldforge dev blog these days. All aggregated on the planet - which isn't actually a planet, or technically attempting to be one, so don't visit it and be disappointed at finding a collection of feeds on Free Software game development. Anyhow, here's a video showing the compass in Ember (note: website is out of date, currently releases is 0.5.5), one of many recent Worldforge developments:
Whenever I see people saying, "Hey, let's create the next world of warcraft or an amazing 3D single player RPG!" I think, why don't you guess help with the Worldforge project. And nobody ever does. And they end up ditching their dreams to become an alpha mud. Like Radakan did.
Back to Worldforge, it's quite impressive these days. Whilst it is client-server based, it has a nicely featured persistent AI server, and the focus seems to be somewhat on non-MMORPG features even though it is an MMORPG toolset. So, if you want to make an RPG or MMORPG, unless you're a blood relative of John Carmack, stop thinking you can do it all yourself when these guys have been designing and implementing it for 10 years and thought through all the problems you don't yet know you have yet to face. Instead, start by prototyping your game on Worldforge. That's an official Free Gamer blog mandate / recommendation. :-)
GearHead2 0.532, lots of bugfixing.
I know I'm missing something other than screenshots and good jokes... there's a game release I've forgotten to mention. Sadly, for comedians everywhere who get relatively funnier when I'm typing, I have to go.
No, Free Gamer has not met a premature demise! I am merely temporarily really, really busy.
Still, there were a few notable releases in the last week. ScummVM hit version 0.9.0 which brings GUI enhancements and support for [at least] two [new] games.
Legends jumped 0.0.0.1 versions to 0.4.1.40, and you should see the changelog. I've already ranted about discussed versioning debacles issues.
Warsow bumped out another release and really seems to be picking up momentum both as a game and a community. They have started up a development blog. This is a great idea and it would be cool for every major Free game to have one; then we can have Free Game Planet!
I spotted yet another 3d engine on Freshmeat: Nelit2. Information is sparse but the screenshots show off some fancy features. It has a long way to go to compete with the heavyweights of this division like OGRE and Crystal Space.
I also saw Carworld as well. It looks like it could be a very cool driving simulator if the author got a bit more motivation (or a bit of help).
Speaking of driving games, VDrift looks to be gearing up for another release. Improved GUI, car handling, graphics, and more cars and tracks are part of what seems to be emerging as the leading Free Software driving game.
There's great news for Mario fans with updates to Mega Mario and Secret Maryo Chronicles.
Finally, a couple of updates sourced from the Game Tome - SEAR and Runescape have been updated. The former is a major component of the ambitious Worldforge project and the latter a popular Java-based MMORPG.
I hope I didn't miss much and I'm in too much of a rush to plagiarise organise screenshots. Next week normal service should be resumed, as well as the forthcoming layout update that will build on the current list. Enjoy your games in the meantime!